


Did you write the book of love?

by readfah_cwen



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, Seblaine Week 2014, side Kurt Hummel/Blaine Anderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 19:31:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1953402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readfah_cwen/pseuds/readfah_cwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you die, the name of your soulmate appears on your body. Blaine was never really sure he made the right choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Did you write the book of love?

**Author's Note:**

> For [Seblaine Week 2014](http://seblaineweek2014.tumblr.com/post/88869315252/seblaine-week-days) Day 7: Soulmates. Title from _American Pie_. So much love and thanks to all the wonderful people who have contributed to this week and read my ramblings. You're all total darlings and you helped make this Seblaine Week the best one yet! ♥
> 
>  **Warnings:** Infidelity. Plane crash mention.

_How did you know you made the right choice?_

Blaine sat in their breakfast nook and didn't ask this question. Kurt stole the fashion pages of the newspaper, Blaine reading the sports -- _Blaine likes football, I like scarves_ \-- and he'd known Kurt for so long every action was calculated precision. Not a dance but a formula, the exact science of Kurt and Blaine, perfectly designed. Universal alignment.

Kurt snorted at something in the paper. Blaine didn't ask. It might have been nice to know, but he also knew what the answer would be. _He thinks that's a good idea?_ Blaine would laugh and agree and they'd take their travel mugs of coffee and go on with their days, _le ballet mécanique._

(Sebastian liked old cinema, not Gene Kelly, but the kind of stuff that was minutes long and mostly experimental. Blaine didn't share the interest but when Sebastian spoke, animated and bright, it made him interested.)

It wasn't a question you answered. Blaine didn't know. Blaine refused to know. He didn't make bad choices like that. The one time he did, and nearly lost Kurt, and the pain of that -- that was confirmation enough, wasn't it? Love was supposed to grab your soul and yank it _hard_ , make you suffer for every drop you put into it, give you the same back. Or maybe it was just supposed to make you feel alive.

Blaine didn't know how to live without Kurt, and that had to be the same thing.

\--

Kurt would touch it sometimes, the spot on Blaine's wrist where his name would be one day. There were no _if_ s for Kurt, and if there had been, Blaine had revoked the right to learn.

"I hope I'm around to see it," Kurt said, smiling dreamily.

"But I want to see yours," Blaine said back, grasping Kurt's own wrist.

"It'll be like _The Notebook_." Kurt invoked the image of Allie and Noah, holding frail hands, each other's names appearing in delicate cursive across their wrists as if the inky oblivion stealing them away was peeking through. It was like an incantation to them, to everyone who didn't want to waste their lives chasing ghosts.

(Sebastian hated _The Notebook_. "What if it hadn't been his name? Would the old bag have kicked him out of bed? Lose everything they had? It's stupid."

"But the reason they had anything to lose was because it was meant to be," Blaine explained, hands cutting shapes in the air like he could make Sebastian see something that wasn't there. "That's the reason they fell in love."

"They fell in love because they let themselves believe in something else," Sebastian corrected. "Otherwise, they'd stick with their safe little options.")

"I love you."

"I love _you_."

\--

Blaine spoke to Sebastian for the last time when he was forty-five. They bumped into each other in Los Angeles, Sebastian holding the door for him before he recognized him, a small smirk appearing on his face when he did. He had changed so much, but the little things that tugged at Blaine stayed the same.

"Blaine Anderson," he drawled. "Of all the coffee shops in all the world."

"Sebastian." Blaine inclined his head. "You look good. Chicago treating you well?"

"I moved," Sebastian said. "New York. Then Boston. Then Paris."

"I didn't see you in New York. You should have dropped in, said hi."

"Hmm." Sebastian glanced up at the coffee board, as if there was a script there. Or maybe Blaine was the one looking for that, because he was tightly offended that Sebastian hadn't dropped in and rattled the bars a little. That couldn't be right. "Still married to Hummel?"

"Twenty-three years strong," Blaine said, and that was his own incantation, trying to make the power as vivid as it had been when the ring had first slid, too-tight, onto his finger.

"Then I think I'll hold off on any visits." He smiled down at Blaine, a private joke lurking in the corners of his eyes. Blaine wished he could unravel it. "But sit with me. Let's catch up."

\--

Three years later, Blaine heard from an old Dalton friend that Sebastian had been on the trans-Atlantic flight that had gone done in a spiral of smoke and fire earlier that week. When previously he had dismissed the never-ending news coverage, he then so deeply buried himself in it that not even Kurt or their children could help uncover him. Blaine collected every scrap of information he could, as if Sebastian's wrist could be found in flight reports and search patterns.

Eventually, the news tapered off, disappeared completely except for in late-night specials on TV years later. There were no survivors, little wreckage, bodies lost to the sea.

"I miss him," Blaine said, when he could get out of bed again. It had been three months, and there he was, stirring milk into his coffee. He felt like he was dissipating into insubstantial clouds himself, secrets the tone of his uncertainty.

"Who?" Kurt asked absently, checking over Tracey's homework. He didn't have secrets, couldn't understand the language Blaine spoke.

"Nobody."

\--

There was a streak of exactly six weeks when Blaine was thirty-two that he saw Sebastian most every day. He was in Chicago on a short-lived production, staying in a lonely hotel room that had exactly two cracks on the ceiling and a headboard with a bit fat whorl in the centre and a bedspread that had an alternating _thick-slim-thick-thick-_ _slim_ striped pattern. He saw a lot of these, on his knees or his back or his front, hoisting strong legs over his arms or clinging to the headboard for support as he rocked down.

Kurt hadn't accompanied him on that trip.

\--

Ideally, soulmates were a good idea. To never have to worry, to always know exactly who you belonged to, who you could gather into your arms and keep forever on your wrist.

Nothing in life was that simple, though. There was the rare story of early bloomers, who halfway through their life or, in a twice in a generation story, their teen years, would get the name. Literature defied these odds and the rest of fiction joined in as time progressed, with endless couples who turned each other's hands over and revolved around what they found.

For the rest of the populace, those who had to exist in some facet of reality, it was a stressful game. Scientists had measured it and philosophers had questioned it, but everybody felt the pressure of passing its test. Psychics claimed to be able to tell you early and some people found the person they thought was the one and tattooed their name early. There was history of homophobic and racist policy makers who tried to cover up the name that was found, scores of famous couples who had each other's names, and affairs discovered by the time one half of a sixty-year marriage died.

Blaine didn't think that last one was a possibility. His attraction to Sebastian was something about the forbidden, or the way Sebastian would just _look_ at him, or the conversations they had, or -- something.

It wasn't cosmic. It wasn't worth coming back home and telling Kurt, _I made another mistake_. It wasn't worth calling a mistake, or maybe worth too much in a completely different way. So Blaine's affair, that month and change where all he felt was Sebastian and they tore Chicago up together, that was only a distraction. It buried itself along with every other secret Blaine had, like the words he would never say to Kurt:

_Sometimes, I don't think I made the right choice._

\--

It wasn't as if Sebastian didn't know his coffee order or how to make Blaine laugh, didn't make Blaine feel gorgeous and spectacular, and _alive_ , didn't make Blaine want to be his best without any expectations. Sebastian did all these things, effortlessly.

"You overthink things," Sebastian told him, when they were twenty-five and ran into each other at the MoMA, heads tilted to the side as they considered a piece of modern art that had lines leading every which way, the exact opposite of how Blaine felt.

"You're supposed to overthink art. For example, the red is obviously meant to represent his mother."

"I meant in general." Sebastian pointed to the plaque next to the painting. "And the red is his father." The little sign read, at the bottom, _There are all the sunsets for a man who was never home_.

It seemed too pretentious for the work, but something clicked in place for Blaine all the same.

"You're right."

"Of course." Sebastian leaned back on his heels. "Want to get out of here?"

Blaine passed on that. Forty-eight and watching CNN tell him that this was _The greatest air tragedy in the past ten years_ , he wondered if things might have changed if he accepted Sebastian's offer. Thirty-two and cheating on his husband who he had promised to never, _ever_ hurt again, Blaine thought it wouldn't change a thing.

There were, he found, no easy answers.

\--

Blaine was dying. Something about his lungs -- he couldn't hear the doctors over the breath that was wheezing out him and childishly grabbing for attention at his ears. He lay in a bed of white linens in a private hospital room that was bedecked in flowers. The tulips meant _Loved your work_ and the daisies meant _I don't know what's wrong with grandpa_  and the yellow-and-red roses meant  _You can't leave me_.

Kurt held his hand the whole time, even though his arthritis must be bothering him, eyes wet. They had divorced when Blaine was sixty-one, a surprisingly amicable affair, then reunited a few years later to great fanfare in the press. Hollywood's Gay Sweethearts, forever as frozen in the public eye as they had been when they first made it big. Blaine's children, his grand-children, were on the way to the hospital. Something about tonight felt a little different, a storm not like the winds that had pushed him into the hospital before.

"I love you," Kurt said. Blaine coughed weakly. Tried to draw in the air to reply, nearly had it, when Kurt suddenly made a choking noise. "B-Blaine ..."

Blaine painfully turned his head. His death sentence was stretching across his wrist, the ink appearing in swift strokes, penned by a hurried god or maybe Blaine's body was just fighting the clock rapidly unwinding inside of him.

(Sebastian once, and only once, let Blaine trace his fingers over his wrist. "I don't like it," he brusquely explained.

"Don't you ever wonder?"

"I know what I want." Sebastian rolled over, brought his hand up, wrist brushing Blaine's mouth as he stroked through Blaine's curls. "What should it matter, what my dead body thinks? It's not the one getting laid."

"There's more to it than sex."

"Well, the dead aren't great at love, either." Sebastian leaned in, kissing Blaine's jaw. "If all that matters is when you're alive, why not go for what you want then?"

Blaine used to know what he wanted, almost all the time, only faltering when Kurt didn't want it too, or when Sebastian Smythe strolled into his life and gave him that look. Blaine fell in love, briefly and hastily, but also over many decades and a rapid month of sex-hot rooms and dinners in the windy city, at a coffee shop in Lima and somewhere in Los Angeles, all the places and empty times in between.

He wished he could tell his heart that just because it wanted something, didn't mean he needed it.)

The name was _Kurt Hummel_.

Kurt cried. Blaine closed his eyes, and summoned his air.

"Sometimes ... I wasn't sure. I'm sorry."

His apology encompassed the ways he had hurt Kurt in his doubt, the ways Kurt never even knew he had been hurt.

"It's okay," Kurt told him.

They were the last words Blaine heard, but the last ones he thought were:

_I'm still not sure._

\--

Sebastian said goodbye to Blaine at O'Hare, kissed his temple, handed him his luggage.

"I'll be seeing you," he said, cheeky grin in place.

"No you won't," Blaine replied, and then yanked Sebastian down for a kiss, parting when his flight was called again. "Take care of yourself, Smythe."

"Only if you promise to keep smiling like that and breaking hearts." Sebastian pinched his cheek, slapped his ass, and sent him on his way. That smile joined all of Blaine's other little secrets, curled inside his heart, deeper than ink daubed on skin.

(Maybe you knew when the right choice was more important than being right.)

**end.**

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr link](http://boldmistakes.tumblr.com/post/91718657551/did-you-write-the-book-of-love-seblaine-1-1)


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